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Well, alright then:
A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.
Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf
Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html
New but not surprising. People involved in retail theft prevention have known this forever. There is no reliable profile for a potential shoplifter. It can be anyone.
Surely you are not suggesting that it’s not possible to reason probabilistically about who is more or less likely to shoplift? I don’t think anyone believes that it is possible to definitively rule anybody out, but I would be shocked if it’s not possible to draw useful and reliable conclusions about whom to devote more resources to focusing on.
I think it's middle class or above teenage girls who are the most likely to shoplift. But if we assume that upper-SES teenage girls are only a small percentage of the US population, then screening for everyone is more prudent. Otherwise, you will miss a lot of potential shoplifters.
My guess is that demographic is over represented in frequency, but not dollar value. They tend to steal trifles for personal use, not to offload to a fence.
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Demographically no, behaviorally on the other hand...
I half suspect that the prog preoccupation with idpol and demographics stems from an underdeveloped sense of social awareness. IE that in lacking the normal predator/danger sense and background theory-of-mind they find themselves defaulting to coarser easier to read signals.
This is a very interesting suggestion that I'd love to see get fleshed out more. It seems to me that it might suggest the root cause of what you call 'idpol preoccupation" isn't necessarily liberal/conservative ideology as much as real-world experience or a lack thereof, but perhaps you would take that in a different direction.
I wonder if Jonathan Haidt's work positing that liberals rely less on moral values involving respect for authority, ingroup/outgroup distinctions, and disgust might tie in here.
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Related: we have deliberately and accidentally managed to make almost every way to read social class in strangers more difficult and unreliable. Imagine this scene from My Fair Lady, or its equivalent lines in the inferior Pygmalion original, today. The entire concepts behind the play almost don't make sense in today's world.
The modern upper class, such as it is, uses constant negro and lower class slang. The pattern of speech can be distinguished over time, but not cleanly and easily. It will take a minute or more of conversation, in a lot of cases, to reliably place someone as rich or poor, and hours to place them in a decile unreliably. Accents are muddled, or affected for gravitas. Where the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers specifically took classes to eliminate their accents, the modern upper class affects accents to seem plebeian.
Where fashion conscious they dress in fashions drawn largely from hip-hop, which in turn derive from street gangs and prison culture; where slovenly they dress in ways so pointlessly indistinct as to be unreadable. Unless one is very adept at reading branding, one cannot at a glance tell who is rich and who is poor. Where in Victorian England the clothing items chosen, the cleanliness and state of repair, the quality and thickness of the fabric, the cut, would all tell you instantly someone's social class. White collar and blue collar mean nothing with the abolition of dress codes in offices and the tendency for office workers to dress like Lumberjacks for fashion purposes. Tattoos are basically as common on young ivy leaguers as they are on bikers these days.
As a result, where in olden days one could rely on reading individuals by class, many now fall back on race, because skin color is one of the few things that can't be altered.
In England you can usually still tell status from accent (yes it’s not exact, but it never was, and it’s still usually accurate) and it doesn’t seem much different here. I suppose it allows for higher class POC with posh accents to distinguish themselves.
Fashions drawn from hip hop involve huge amounts of class-based status signalling, but like the majority of the American class system over the last 100-150 years it’s primarily wealth-based rather than determined by parentage or upbringing. If your wife likes clothes and bags and jewelry, she can tell you from looking at a woman whether she has (new) money or not, which is typically what passes for status in America.
I have been told multiple times that I speak exactly like an English person, said in such a way as to be a complement. I always feel like correcting this with "No, I speak English better than an Englishman" for, to borrow a quote from Pygmalion itself, "The English do not know how to speak their own language, Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it, speak it well" but I always think better of it and just accept the complement.
Also amusing are the times when I interact with locals say they only speak one Language, English, since that is all they ever need (with a hint of their language being so superior that they don't need to know anything else, these people by and large tend to be lower class and less educated too) and I always have a very snarky urge to butt in and correct them with "Actually, you speak precisely zero languages, the doggerel that comes out of your mouth can not, in good conscience, be called English", but again here I always think better of it and move on.
Look man, this is a vague and general example of "boo outgroup" and it's not directed at anyone in particular here, but this schtick where you repeatedly post about how much you hate white people and Western civilization and rub your hands in glee at the thought of it being conquered is getting old, tired, and obnoxious as hell. Stop trying to edgepost, stop thinking you're a lord sneering at your inferiors. You've been banned before and if you keep this up you will be banned again.
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Sir, this insult to the great work of Bernard Shaw unsullied by the "musicalification" needed to make it palatable to the common mind shall not go unchallenged. I demand satisfaction!
(Though you have to admit, Hepburn was resplendent in the film, but she was resplendent in all of them, so that doesn't get it any points)
God forbid anyone jazz up a dry-as-dust social farce with several of the best songs in the entire Western musical tradition. No, we can only deliver messages by having everyone stand quietly in a drawing room and exchange their views. Shavian "humor" indeed.
Seriously, Pygmalion is a fine work, but the musical is superior. The songs have at least three absolute bangers, the kind of stuff that gets played without reference to the musical and has become part of the American Songbook tradition: Wouldn't it be Loverly, The Street Where You Live, and Get Me To The Church On Time ((Which I also force everyone to listen to before planning any Bachelor/ette party: if your party doesn't meet this basic theme it is a complete failure, a Groom Shower for mincing pussies not a proper Stag)). Then the next tier of plot specific songs all make for great reaction youtube links, Why Can't the English, A Little Bit of Luck, Just You Wait, You Did It. The music is fantastic, a classic in its own right.
Then, the plot changes. The Frasier-Crane-Ass naysayers have always argued that the musical's happy ending is a betrayal, ruins the oh-so-serious dark complexity of Shaw. Codswalllop. Shaw's original was, dare I say it?, too woke. It's a feminist fantasy, where once educated Eliza must become self-actualized, free from her prior restraints, independent and determined to live her own life. Women universally prefer the musical. Because that is the way that a woman would really act if she were carved from marble by a man she'd be under his spell and never really escape. Rex Harrison is the sexiest man in the universe to most women watching the play, why would Eliza leave! The play has a too optimistic bluepill view of female and human nature, the musical corrects it.
Lol this must sound crazy to anyone who hasn't seen My Fair Lady:
"Alright fellas, we've got a dozen bottles of tequila and bourbon, an eightball of speed and a bus load of hookers is on their way up. Pop on the My Fair Lady soundtrack and let's get fucking nuts!"
In the planning stage lah.
I HATE getting dragged to a Bachelor party that has been so totally neutered to avoid pissing off the fiancee that it's just a hangout. The whole concept is that it's one last night out with the boys before getting married, if it is entirely things that you're allowed to do after you get married then why are you fucking dragging me out to Nashville or Asheville or whatever. I kid you not: somebody tried to get me to go on a fucking GHOST TOUR as part of a bachelor party.
Then you have the guys who are so petrified of speaking to another woman that we have to go out into the woods miles from anywhere at all and drink so much expensive bourbon that someone almost dies. Which I don't ENTIRELY object to, but don't entirely like either.
Bachelor parties should feature a mix of bars, nightclubs and strip clubs. The groom-to-be should engage in some minor activity that he would not engage in once married. If no one is seeing, or at minimum brushing against, some breasts then it is a waste of everyone's time. We should be in various places where everyone points at the groom-to-be and says he's about to get married, and women in the place at least play at trying to seduce him away from marriage, attention which he enjoys but resists.
Hence the song! It's the perfect outline of everything a Bachelor party should consist of rightfully. Drinking, song, dance, loose women, a controllable modicum of risk. If you lack one or more of those elements, don't drag me on some cockamamie Groom Shower for your fat fiancee's instagram.
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WARNING: Spoilers for Pygmalion/My Fair Lady below, I highly recommend watching the whole thing, it's worth your time (99%+ confidence); Pygmalion is freely available here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmdPj_XbF30 , My Fair Lady can be found without much difficuly on the high seas.
Really? Bearnard Shaw quite convincingly argued the opposite, at least to me, in the afterward he wrote to his play: https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/pygmalion/sequel-what-happened-afterwards/ , the whole thing is very worth reading, but it's the ending which clinches it for me (bolding mine):
Eliza is deeply interested in Higgins, but this is not a romantic interest, it is the sort of interest one has towards one's heroes or even one's Gods. Making her come back grovelling to Higgins just demeans the person she is now, and by extension demeans Higgins crafting ability since he created what Eliza is at the end of the story.
Even ignoring all that making Eliza and Higgins get together just ruins My Fair Lady completely for me. It's not believable; not just from Eliza's end but also Higgin's end. Higgins isn't sexually interested in Eliza, he is interested in Eliza in the same way that any elevated man is interested in true friendship, which as a thing is far rarer and more worthy than true love, indeed as La Rochefoucauld said hundreds of year before Shaw: "However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship".
Even then, why would Higgins want to marry Eliza and have her dedicate her time to domestic duties, he has Mrs. Pearce for that and his station in life (and the time) is such that even if he wanted himself a wife he could easily get himself a far more docile and beautiful woman gladly willing to wed him who he could boss around much easier. In Eliza Higgins created an equal, someone worthy of going toe to toe with himself; you would not cage your fellow man would you, why should Higgins want to cage Eliza?
Higgins doesn't want Eliza to leave him for the same reason that Michaelangelo would be very sad and unhappy if his David suddenly disappeared, throwing in a latent romantic (and by extension sexual) motive to his actions demeans the man himself.
Much like how the chapters on Scouring of the Shire are an integral part to what LoTR is, the ending to Pygmalion is a fundamental part of the whole that you can't just straight up and replace while keeping the work the same thing (and not depicting the scouring was my principal complaint with the Peter Jackson films).
Pygmailion had to be made sacharrine to be palatable to the common man and that didn't just involve the songs thrown in (which I admit are good, Bernard Shaw would probably be rolling around in his grave if he found out though) but it is the change to the end which completely ruins it all, turining it from incisive social commentary and haute drama into a mere romcom, something you take a girl to see on your second date with her.
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The play isn’t “blue pill” or woke, it’s just telling a different story with completely different motivations for the protagonist.
The film genericizes the plot into the generic Pretty Woman romcom where the charming and suave man saves the humble and overlooked girl from a miserable life and elevates her. It’s the classic ‘I can fix her’ narrative which appeals - as all the best romantic comedies do - to both sexes. It’s not even necessarily gendered, since it’s a fantasy for both sexes to get a “great deal” on the dating/marriage/sex marketplace by taking someone of lower status and elevating them above what they could get in their own class / status / looks range to start with. See jokes about dating a fat girl and taking her to the gym etc.
The original story is darker and involves actual satire, the rest of the cast are much more fleshed out, and the ending retains a glorious ambiguity. My Fair Lady is merely the default romcom with some limited aesthetic influence from Pygmalion, if even that. In addition, Higgins has a lot of Shaw in him, and Shaw seems to have had a strange disinterest in sex that would make elevating a pretty peasant girl to society for himself to fuck incongruent with the narrative as presented.
Part of the humor of the story is that he really is doing it as a bet, not to sleep with Eliza.
I don’t know that the film portrays Higgins as suave or charming; maybe as a straight guy I’m just not picking up on what women would see in him, but to me Higgins comes off as a turbo-autistic and self-absorbed Confirmed Old Bachelor. The song “A Hymn To Him” implies that he’s at best an ardent misogynist (and not in the “believes in restrictions on female sexuality” feminist sense, but rather the purer “can’t stand to be around women, prefers the exclusive company of men” sense), at worst a self-closeted homosexual narcissist who is only capable of interacting respectfully with people who share his precise personality. However, I do agree that the ending of the film lets him off the hook.
That being said, maybe @FiveHourMarathon’s redpilled reading of the film is correct and that in real life Eliza would return to Higgins, whether because his domineering attitude and aloofness toward her are genuinely attractive, or because a woman from her background would recognize the obvious practical/financial downsides to a long-term relationship with Freddy and would decide instead on the pragmatic hard-headed choice to hitch her wagon to Higgins, as flawed and difficult as he may be.
Probably the best synthesis is simply to accept that straight plays and musicals have inherently different purposes. While there are examples of musicals with unambiguously tragic/unhappy endings, generally speaking (and this is especially true of Golden Age musicals like My Fair Lady) audiences are just never going to accept a bleak and emotionally-unsatisfying ending to a musical. Plays can get away with that because the genre conventions are far less hard-coded. My tastes lean toward preferring the bleak and unsparing ending - I’ve joked in the past that I never want to see another movie with a happy ending ever again - but I accept the realities of what it took to get the film made.
(Such as casting a lead actress who couldn’t sing and dubbing virtually every line of her singing in the film, and then not crediting the splendid Marni Nixon for her overdubbing. I love Audrey Hepburn as much as any straight man with eyes does, but the part should have gone to Julie Andrews, and thank god someone took a chance on her soon after and her full career was launched by The Sound Of Music.)
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There's whole sequences in both plays devoted to showing this, I'd argue it was much more effectively achieved in the musical where the disinterest is easier to show in blocking and attitude, along with two whole ass songs about it, where the play shows it by character walks into room and gives dissertation on the topic. The romance isn't remotely similar to Pretty Woman, as you say Higgins isn't seeking to "make a good deal" which is where the humorous character of the father comes into view. The humor and romance is precisely finding love at a time when you aren't looking for it, about closeness and intimacy melting neuroticism and narcissism.
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You are still doing "dems are the real racists" bit, huh.
Antagonistic, one day ban.
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Ages ago there was this youtube cartoon (or maybe it was still in the Flash era of internet animation), where the running gag was the main character facing a barrage of extremely witty and elaborate insults, responding with "you fucking moron...", and walking off with a satisfied smile, and triumphant music. I can't think of a better portrayal of the "dems are the real racists" dynamic. Like yes, they very obviously are. They publish pages upon pages of academic literature describing in detail how people should be judged by the color of their skin, and how it's morally wrong to say things like "there's only one race - the human race".
On one hand, I understand how we've had this conversation a thousand times before and there's not much more to add, but I don't understand how people sneering at "dems are the real racists" get to pretend they've decisively won (other than by brute censorship, that is).
The people sneering at "dems are the real racists" haven't won. They're doing the sneering because the dems won, and pointing out they are real racists doesn't harm them in the slightest.
Yeah, I misjudged who I was responding to, but I have issues with that side using the sneer as well. It's fine and well to point out you're not going to stop them from being racist by calling them racist, but that's not what Hlynka was doing, so the whole thing ends up looking like "we must become our enemy to defeat them".
It's not "we must become our enemy to defeat them", it's "we must use tactics which work, even if the enemy has used them". "Democrats are the real racists" doesn't work. It convinces nobody of anything. Hlynka's preference is to keep losing without a fight and keep retreating into the smaller and smaller areas (both literal and figurative) the progressives haven't completely stomped, and hope the Second Coming happens before he runs out of area. That's why the scorn.
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Dems certainly hate white people, but it's more like they went so far anti-racist it looped back around. Boomercons can't deal with nuance or color outside of the lines, so they just repeat these gotcha nonsense takes.
Really? All Dems? Or are you just booing your outgroup? (Yes, you are.) Don't do this. (ETA: Just saw @cjet79 already banned you below.)
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To recycle an old slogan, hating a race for anti-racism is like fucking for virginity, and that's without going into the mask occasionally dropping with things like getting rid of Math requirements in school.
I even agree with you about Boomercons having the annoying habit of staying within the frame of their opponents, but they already are aware of the limits to "equality", which is the whole reason they oppose all the progressive plans to push ever-more in that direction. This is why I never got the impression that the "dems are the real racists" sneer is meant to argue for nuance, or even thinking outside the box, and tend to think there's something darker behind it.
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It's ok, in his defense he's only pretending to be a retard.
7 day ban
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Yes, because Dems really are the real racists.
Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 the Dems are and always have been the party of the lynch mob. Are you really going to try to argue otherwise?
Edit: formatting
2020s dems are a logical conclusion of taking egalitarian lies seriously. If differences are only skin deep, then disparities must be due to "systemic racism holding blacks down". You don't have a coherent worldview, you're clinging to outdated virtuesignaling.
This doesn’t follow. Real average behavior differences(which is what drives outcomes- more blacks are in prison because they’re more likely to commit crimes) between whites and blacks can be explained by three things- culture, biological differences, and unfalsifiable conspiracy theories. If biological differences aren’t real or big enough to explain the difference, then it’s probably culture and not some postulated conspiracy.
Don't worry, thinking that there's anything wrong with black culture is "racist" too. That's why all those expectations like timelyness (or maybe even not to get randomly socked in the mouth) are "rooted in white supremacy".
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No they are not, They are Woodrow Willson lite. Claims to the contrary are lies sold to you by your jewish marxist poli-sci professor.
Antagonistic comment, but you already received a ban for something else.
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This is false. Some demographics shoplift at drastically higher rates than others. You can never be certain someone is or isn't a shoplifter demographically but you can definitely reason probabilistically.
No it is not. At least not with sufficient reliability to be useful. P = 0.5 might be enough to publish if you're working in a particularly "soft" academic field but it don't mean shit in the real world.
Where the hell are you getting p=0.5 from? Do you even know what a p value is? A p value is the probability of observing a result at least as far from the mean by random chance if the null hypothesis (in this case the hypothesis that all demographics commit shoplifting equally) was true. We have a ton of data on shoplifting. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of incidents spanning decades all across the country. The data shows a very clear trend that certain age groups (teens and 20's) and certain races (blacks) commit shoplifting at much higher rates than other ages or groups. This isn't some tiny marginal difference that only shows up on large datasets. We're talking double, triple, quadruple the rates. If you were to calculate a p value for this effect it would be astronomically tiny due to the huge sample size and large effect size.
I do and that's the joke. Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics. ;-)
What I'm suggesting is things like "evasive body language" and "baggy coat on a summer day" are far more indicative of "shoplifting" than any demographic quality, but because people raised in a upper-middle class progressive milieu have an underdeveloped sense of social awareness they are less able to read such signals.
That's not what you said. You said "demographically, no" when asked whether it was possible to reason probabilistically about who was more likely to shoplift. There is a huge difference between saying that behavioral data gives more information than demographic data and saying that demographic data gives no probabilistic information at all. It sounds like you're backtracking here.
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I think the line gets blurry because you often have people using demographics and race as a proxy for behavioral cues, associated with subcultures that cluster around race. If you see a black suburban teenage you've never seen before in your store, it's easy to pile on and associate with them common behaviors you find in that cultural cohort (often criminal and deviant).
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I think it’s a general progressive aversion to the idea of bad behavior having bad outcomes and good behavior having good outcomes- criminals must be poor because poverty, a floating cloud thing that latches on to people through no fault of their own, causes crime, and not because being a criminal is a bad decision. It’s not hard to notice criminals are blacker than average for whatever reason- you can blame it on HbD, bad culture, ‘systemic racism’, the god of thieves really hating sagging pants, whatever. And in the progressive worldview that causality only goes one way.
It’s not only race and crime; progressive Christianity also hates the idea of divine punishment for sin, whether in this life or the next, and divine reward for justness. Maybe moldbug’s calvinism thesis isn’t just schizoposting, or maybe there’s some other reason. But progressives in general, and all over their lives, mostly don’t believe the link between good behavior and good things, and bad behavior and bad things, and to a lot of them- it’s a tragedy. I’ve listened to progressives cry about how good behavior isn’t rewarded by society and that’s why so many of the deserving poor are immiserated. I don’t think this thesis is true, but I understand how wealthy blue tribers could think it is.
How does calvinism tie in?
The idea that God's punishments/rewards are utterly unconnected to our virtues/demerits?
Of course as I say downthread, I don't actually believe progressivism is just Calvinism minus spirituality. But Calvinism minus spirituality(like many liberal protestant denominations) winds up being a lot like progressivism.
Well, sort of—our punishment is entirely connected to our demerits, but our rewards are because of Christ's merits. (And this is largely true of Christianity in general, to some extent, at least—saying that unregenerate man can merit his own salvation is Pelagian.)
I don't think liberal denominations are due to particular denominational distinctives. The only real reason that Catholics, for example, aren't affected like the mainline protestant denominations (well, at the level of official teaching, I'm sure there are a ton of bad parishes), is because of the inability to abandon prior commitments—you can't really get much further than the recent same sex blessings without crossing relatively clear lines (while the mainline Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and yes, Presbyterians, have all gone farther). It rather seems to just be that they follow leftist politics, and bend teaching to match—progressivism comes first, and its churchly counterpart is derivative.
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What is this persistent fixation on trying to establish a link between progressivism and Christianity? I am progressive precisely because I am not Christian, I don't think there's any "next life" where all virtue and sin is accounted for to compensate for the unjustness of the earthly realm. You and I see sin being rewarded and virtue being punished every day, you may pick any definition of "sin" and "virtue" that aren't the circular "good behaviour is when good outcome" type.
I'm the motte's favorite tradcath poster, I don't think that Christianity causes progressivism or that progressivism is just Christianity or whatever. That maybe was more to call attention to someone else who noticed the same pattern.
I don't buy into Moldbug's calvinism thesis and think that something progressivism adjacent is the inevitable result of secularizing a Christian society(and progressivism is not particularly Christian, but it is very definitely post-Christian in a way it is not post-Islamic or post-Shinto or whatever), but I understand how someone who makes that observation could make a link between progressivism and Calvinism, especially when many of the most 'liberal protestant'/heterodox-by-way-of-progressivism churches are creedally Calvinist and one of the most progressive parts of the country was literally founded as a Calvinist cult colony. It wasn't a particularly strong maybe, I think it's more likely that Calvinism is just uniquely prone to abandoning any of the actual religious parts to become post-Christian, and that post-Christianity is unusually fertile ground for progressivism. The west's path out of progressivism is to re-embrace the faith of our fathers.
Good deeds sometimes get punished, and bad deeds rewarded, that's true. But most impoverished westerners are impoverished because of their or their parent's poor decisionmaking skills, upward mobility is very high for well-behaved working Americans. Most poor people who make good decisions become normal working class people, and most normal working class people who make bad decisions become poor people. Virtue is normally rewarded and vice normally has negative consequences. Yes, there are exceptions, but I'm pretty sure you understand averages.
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This is honestly kind of blowing my mind because it's not a framing/explanation that would have occurred but the more I think about it, the more it matches the available evidence. I had a good portion of an effort post on trust and credibility written that I think I might have to rewrite now.
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I think this is a bad model. You can find people who think like this, but it's a specific case of a broader disagreement over the actual mutability of outcomes.
(American) Conservatives adhere to a kind of socio-economic Calvinism and think outcomes are fixed, so we should be preoccupied with punishing bad behavior so they can't ruin it for everyone else. This is important for the conservative world view because without it they're just the latest round of elites explaining why it's god's will that they're rich and you're poor.
Progressives believe outcomes are changeable (as do most people left of center, though their specific analysis varies) and often think focusing on punishment for bad behavior is a distraction or outright impediment to improving outcomes. This is important to the progressive world view because without it they're just pissing straight up.
Americans in general have a lot of strange political and economic juxtapositions.
Take the protests that were happening in France not too long ago, with Macron and compare him with Trump's activities. If you look back to when Trump was elected, almost no western liberal would've disagreed that he was a disaster for the US, and that someone like Macron was a success for France. But if you come up to today, the exact 'opposite' had been proven true.
The roots of people's anger with Macron going far back, had to do with him wanting to implement some pretty sound macroeconomic reforms. One thing he wanted to do was increase the diesel tax, which would e reduced their budget deficit and helped lower CO2 emissions. Their fiscal position would've been stronger, and that would've increased international confidence and investment in France so the bottom half of the population could benefit. But the population naturally didn't want to tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain, so it didn't happen.
If you look at Trump, he had the trust and confidence of the bottom 50%. When he attacked the establishment, he was venting the anger of that half of the population that felt ignored and cast by the wayside. So when he got elected, it had a cathartic effect on the bottom half of the population, in a way you didn't experience those protests in DC. The average incomes of Americans has stagnated over the course of the last 40 years, and quite noticeably. We bviously have a right to be angry, but the problem with our society is that we too strongly emphasize the principle of liberty over addressing social and economic inequalities.
The problem with western liberalism is that we tend to believe that as long as elections are held and people can vote freely and equally, that that 'alone' is sufficient for our stability and prosperity, and it isn't. The government also needs an active and responsible hand in raising the quality and standard of living of it's citizens. And believing in the former above stated fiction, it means that we internalize our own economic woes and failings, and attribute them to our own personal incompetence and not broader social conditions.
Trump's policies of running larger deficits in relatively good times was destined to bring pain later on, as everybody who paid attention could foresee, while Macron could've ameliorated some economic woes, if only the population would've remained patient with him. But they didn't. Liberals messed up where Trump was concerned, by focusing too much on 'the man'. If liberals wanted to regain the trust of voters, that involves taking a stance against the status quo that blocks meaningful reform from taking place.
That's because t's easy to lie, mislead, or just be overly optimistic about long term gains. On the other hand, it's hard to be wrong about the short term pain.
Right, and, making transportation more expensive is going to have economic ripple effects that are hard to predict.
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Hm, I've never encountered this specific thought before, though I've noticed what I think is part of the process, in which progressives have taught children to never trust one's own snap judgment of others, as that would be stereotyping, and everyone deserves to be seen as individuals. Thus kids didn't have a chance to learn and develop intuitions about others based on snap judgments. And yet we still need to make snap judgments sometimes, and I suppose it's possible that that energy got channeled from the more conservative stereotypes to the progressive-approved stereotypes.
At least, this is my pet theory as someone who used to be a child taught by progressives 20+ years ago, when I and everyone around me really seemed to believe that a society where we rise above stereotypes was possible and desirable. The progressives who taught me seemed to genuinely believe in creating this world of judging individuals by the content of their individual character, and I don't believe they were motivated by idpol, but perhaps the rise of idpol to mainstream progressivism in the last 2 decades (idpol of the modern CRT variety has been around for a very long time, of course, but it's the recent mainstreaming that's notable) is a consequence of the kids lacking access to something like stereotyping to make snap judgments. Heck, even attractiveness and fatness aren't allowed as judgment tools these days (nor were they 20 years ago when I was in school).
Then there's the continued atomization of society making people have even less practice in talking to strangers or loosely-known acquaintances, thus giving them even less confidence in their ability to make accurate snap judgments. We might have run into a sort of perfect storm scenario the last couple decades.
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I’m not sure. As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so. That doesn’t mean you can’t build a psychological model, or notice dress or behavior that’s more common with shoplifters than the general public. I see a guy in a big bulky puffer jacket in June, I’d bet on him being a shoplifter.
Are you lying on purpose or are you actually this ignorant? The demographic data is quite clear. Blacks shoplift at drastically higher rates than whites or Asians.
I could ask you the same question.
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Blacks are a lot more likely to shoplift and commit crimes in general.
I also assume that the viral photos you sometimes see of black hair products in anti-shopliftimg cases next to white hair products without any additional protections are done by retail chains based on their actual shrinkage data and not because they're racist.
I'm also curious if anyone has tried to collect data on which Walmarts have a checkout within the make-up section vs. those without and compare it to the demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods. My anecdotal experience is that checkouts within the make-up section are more common in more ghetto area Walmarts.
Alternatively, this may be more about who buys stolen goods than about who actually steals them, if shoplifters are fairly likely to be professional rather than stealing for personal use.
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In the same way people rate disaster recovery based on whether the local waffle house is open or no, you could probably do similar based on how the local supermarket is structured.
I always do get a twisted sort of amusement seeing how the same store chain can have a radically different structure and layout based on the local socio-economics.
Everything except Aldi.
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